Live and let live

A hard challenge awaited us as we returned from our summer vacation.
I recognized it as a proof of live and how we understand it.

/times and places

Since several years now, we do vacations as our variant of the “Grand Tour”. We take our chances to get inspired, improve skills, and find impulses abroad. Some of them we realize instantly, others take teir time to effect.

During our more than four week absence from ‘home’ we demonstrated our kids once again

Home is, where Your people are.

I participated in a remote-working-meetup which was hosted by PoDoJo in Berlin, Zurich and Zoom. They featured the enlighting lightling – Lisette Sutherland and Jack Berglund from doodle. I followed the speeches and passed the break-outs while kids were tranquilized by TV shows and got evening meal prepared by me. Rule #1: do not mixup spheres! Don’t brush teeth while reporting monthly figures. Rule #2: remote wins. That is another story …

I continued blogging. I managed to keep up me self-chosen release cycle – one every week.
I wrote about the non-importance of being co-located to stay in touch (DE).
I wrote about some abstractions, I found proven in our everyday life. It is an easy to witness phenomen which is really hard to understand. I called it “facts and fakes” (EN).

At the end of the trip, I shared some of my insights about learning progress and how Your experiences of success will impede mastering of future challenges. It is about my impediments to excel surfing skills and the foundation we laid for Kid 2, learning to ride horses. And it is about the interconnectedness, I witness everywhere and I bear witness of by these posts.

Somewhere in between, Tobias and I released a very early preview of “The Art of Collaboration”. More about this project, You will find at the bottom of this post. Keep calm and wait for the rest to come. It is already there and stays there. No need to rush.

All in all, this life is pretty near to what I imagined for myself, once reading Tim Ferris’ “4-Hour-Workweek”. 4 hours? You might ask astonished. Yes, I spend even less than four hours a week on administrative tasks. The rest is my pleasure while thinking, researching, writing, phoning, designing and delivering what I love to do in the very moment while having appointments, creating eMails and whatever else I do to get paid for effecting something and enjoying life, also. A pretty good deal for all from my perspective. And very hard work do get there after more than 25 years surviving in doing Business.

Finally, we made our way back to so called ‘normal’, where we prepared for schooling of our older twos.

/the challenge

As we returned, we recognized ants all over the kitchen place. Now, we reached the crossraods. Decisions were needed. How would this suit to our life-embracing mindset?
Chances were good to convert the situation into an embarrassing life.

Talk is cheap.

So we had to find a way, to deal with this reality, we could not ignore or hide from our children. Kid 3 constantly pointed somewhere and yelled “Ameise!”.

We quickly agreed, extinction is unacceptable. Well, unacceptable for the moment … unless we gave other options a try.

So, we started research on the inexhaustible source of knowledge – the internet. In fact, there is much experience stored on uncountable websites. Most of them originated from the early days in the era of ‘user-generated-content’. And, as a relict of these days formed by Sturm and Drang, most of these sources are neither curated nor *rated in any other way.

So, we needed to find out ourselves.
Last year, I experienced a mixture of baking soda and dish detergent to be quite effective when sprayed at contaminated areas. And by the way, it is quite effective for cleaning also. So, I stayed to use this method for cleaning kitchen surfaces – even throughout winter times.

This time, it wasn’t enough. It gave relief for only some minutes after the cleaning action. So, we needed to search for the causes.
The ants found their way to our sweet-repository. Astonishingly, none of the Kids moaned as we took out everything and sorted by contamination. A third of the stock was doomed to go directly to the garbage bin. We cleaned the facility and hope raised … until … next day, there was “Hello again!”.

After half of the morning wandering on ant-streets with no name, the root cause seemed to be identified. They found ground underneath our garden rocket quite homelike. In our case is was once cultivated in a trough on the deck of our balcony. We missed the point to harvest and so nature went on growing as we were somewhere else.

My spouse found another promising relief and phoned me at my office. I assured, we are in hold of cinnamon and cloves and so we decided to prepare a broth in the evening. The intense smell should expel them from the soil where they chose residency during our absence.

Now, there was a hardness to come. None of us has forseen this. As I flooded the soil which was underneath the driven out roquette, evacuation plans of the ant-society were initiated. They backpacked their hatch in eggs and left the place in a hurry. For a mother she is, this was as well as hard as for me as an empathic father. I pretended rationality and focused on the effects we intended to result in.

Relief endured for a small while. The tribe rescued their members underneath a pot saucer next to the trough. My spouse found another treatment for this situation at the ‘dump of knowledge’ as we experience the internet today. She marked the border between the territory we reserved for them and ours with table salt.

None of this seem to effect in what we long to see. There were ants still, but in a decreased number. Partial victory so far.
Now, about two weeks later, frontiers seem to be clear. They stay at theirs and away from ours.

At the Sunday in between, I saw a TV show together with the two older ones. It was about expelling moles from garden soil and how they were concentrated on the only lot in the neighborhood where the owner refused to contribute force to the displacement activities.

This intensified my thoughts about this topic.

/insights

Who am I to decide about life and death of any creature?

Isn’t this exactly what I refuse in ancient interpretations of the Bible? Who are we as mankind to make the world our own, to make it a subject to our megalomaniac wordview?

As I understand the topic of life, it is about being part of the whole. We are a component of the ecosystem we also call environment as every other creature is. Where does our misguided belief – the world is to serve us – result from?

All these thoughts are nothing but new to me. As I full-throttled through the 1990’ies and up to the middle of the 00-decade, I smashed into some invisible EgoBarriers arisen from the tremendous effects we achieved all around the IT-Business world. One of it was my own. Some of the higher barriers were these erected by others Egos. I experienced the nemesis of my personal hero-attitude in the beginning of the 2010’s.

Years of restoration followed and made me open up to buddhist view to the world. I always struggled with this imperative to stay peaceful in sight of an attack. Maybe I still missed the point? Where is the consistency between calm and peaceful Dalai Lama and fighting Shaolin monks defending China’s emperors from threats? And what Zazen and all its sitting has to do with it?

Another TV show, I saw with my kids, opened up my inner eyes. It was about martial arts and the philosophy behind.
The Shaolin way to Buddhism for example is not about being defenseless – it is about not to attack.

Now, my mindset and my attitude is in balance. I finally found Zen in the Art of Living.

It is about standing Your ground without extincting all and everything around You.
It is about being able to fight without fighting. It is about sovereignity resulting from wisdom and mastership.
It is about acting only in a need and about providing conditions preventing from the need to react.

This is what I already understood by my interpretation of permaculture and where development inside spiral dynamics will lead to.
In the end, it is all the same – and different.

/whatif there is nothing?

We all act on the fundament of our convictions. If You decided to see aggression everywhere, it will be aggression everywhere.
Stupid, isn’t it?

What, if You extinct me?

What, if I extinct You?

What, if we all benefit from coexistence?

/conclusion

We do not love ants in our sweets. And it is definitely no option to leave our home to them. So, we needed to change the way of our coexistence.

We marked our territories and hoped the message was clear and understood by them. So far, they got it.
I hope, withdrawal on my Karma account did not left it unbalanced. Take this post as a deposit.

Note to myself:
ask for statement of account, next time I meet Bodhidharma.

/how to?

Stay tough in Your convictions, until life offers better ones.
Spread the words You accept as Your truth to perceive resonance from it.

I did and found some comrades in mind.
We are all working in corporate environments and contribute to change them into a culture of enduring sustainability.

At one site, I was gifted with this remarkable sentence to grant a say

Some other insights, I share together with the Company Pirate, my co-author Tobias Leisgang.
We called it “The Art of Collaboration” and we publish here.
If You need to understand the concept first, start here.

Feel free to confront us with some of Your challenges.
If we accept it as a real challenge, our ‘altered Ego’ Frank will provide inspiration on a monthly basis until it is ‘done-done’.

/etc

Posts like this, I name “thought-protocols”. They are processed results from impulses I get from my everyday life. If You like to call this habit ‘dumping to the internet’ – feel free, it’s up to You. I prefer the term ‘storing out’.

Best overview of all I estimate being worth to share, You get if You access my twitter-channel (DE/EN).
You are also invited to follow me there or the blog here or everywhere else.

And, be careful about whom to follow. Some judge worthiness to follow from the number of followers. That’s not my cup of tea. I like to get inspired, be inspired and inspiring through what ever resulted from processing of all these sparkling moments around me.
It’s about coexistence. So, You are also welcome to leave some comments below. May they effect in some liveliness.

Like this:

Interesting post. My brother swears by marking your territory (windows and doors) with cinnamon as well. His theory is that it interrupts the scent trails ants leave to help them find their colonies, encouraging them to move elsewhere.

Thank You for sharing, Shala.
This interrupting effect should also cause from the dish detergent/soda spray I started with.
The broth from cinnamon and cloves is totally another dimension. It is not only interrupting.
It yells “STAY OUT!”
If You like, evaluate cloves first. Boil, smell and add cinnamon – then You instantly know what I write about. That’s the magic of complexity You experience in that and You can experience in so much else phenomena all around us.